Eight-time Blues Music Award-nominated singer/songwriter/cornetist Al Basile announces an October 9th release date for Blues In Hand, his latest album on Sweetspot Records, with distribution by City Hall.
Blues In Hand is Al’s 21st release on Sweetspot since 1998. After 2023’s career retrospective B’s Time, Al is back with all new songs and a new production team. Using his Duke Robillard and Roomful of Blues veteran players and recorded by Jack Gauthier in the familiar surroundings of Westlake Recording studio in West Greenwich, Rhode Island, Al had combined Jack’s great tracking with the most up-to-date technology by mixer and mastering engineer Glenn Halverson at his Sonic Hill Studio outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The results are a new sound for Al’s classic blues-roots songs.
“As my own producer, I’ve worked closely with engineers Jack Gauthier and Glenn Halverson to make Blues in Hand a leap forward in the sound of an Al Basile record. My albums have always boasted superior songwriting and performances, and now we’ve combined classic traditional recording techniques with a modern approach to the sound of the band. I had a long run between Through With Cool in 2022 and this one, so these are the best songs of the many I’ve written since that album. I also took much of the time afforded me during COVID to work on my vocals and especially my horn playing, so on this record I’ve featured myself much more prominently on cornet. My sound and solos are unlike any other horn player, and they fully honor the link back to Louis Armstrong, showing us a hundred years ago how a cornet can be a powerful voice in playing blues. So, this record captures the best of me as a performer as well. With guitar hero Kid Andersen again aboard along with current and former Duke’s men Mark Teixeira, Brad Hallen, Bruce Bears, Doug James, and Doc Chanonhouse, the band behind me is tighter than ever and predictably brilliant and idiomatic. They really know how to showcase me at my best. With no weaknesses from inception to realization, this record jumps out at you as a celebration of modern blues, and classic Al Basile.”
Al's last release, 2023's B's Time, was his critically acclaimed career retrospective that featured 17 songs from Basile’s solo albums, remastered using the most up-to-date technology. Those tracks never sounded better, and many were from releases early in Al’s career, before he became much better known following his Blues Awards nominations starting in 2010. And though they originated from a 25-year span, the songs sounded completely contemporary, showing that Al Basile’s work is timeless, and that his output has been remarkably consistent from the beginning.
“The two biggest differences from my previous work and Blues In Hand are: 1) the songs are more personal, and mostly in my own voice, instead of my playing a lot of characters like I've often done in the past,” Al Basile says about the new disc. “They reflect some things that I've gone through in the past few years that allowed me to write and sing with authority about some blues themes I haven't done before; and 2) I play more cornet on this album, with longer solos - it features me a stretching out a lot more, with the horn as my other voice. It's more of an overall statement of who I am.”
“Al Basile is one of the great musical storytellers,” wrote UK-based music journalist Colin Clarke in the B’s Time album liner notes. “That holds whether he is working over the span of a whole album (his astonishing Last Hand and its full, ‘radio/verse play’ version, Last Hand 2.0), or within the confines of a single song – each of the 17 songs on this retrospective is a microcosmic magical entity in its own right. This celebration of 25 years of Basile’s Sweetspot record label, and the positively protean nature of his output, is timely, even if a mere 17 songs can only provide the tip of the Basile iceberg.
“No two songs of Basile’s are alike, yet all contain the stamp of his endless invention. No other writer, surely, traverses musical genres, or even whole fields of art, like Al Basile, and this retrospective is the perfect place to appreciate this unique diversity.”
Blues In Hand Track Listing and Credits
- All Your Lies
- Blues is My Roommate
- Blues After Blues
- How Is It?
- Good Friends
- Leave It All Behind You
- Ain’t What You Say (It’s What You Do)
- Older by the Minute
- Thank You, Fool
- Good Rhythm
- My Dearest Dream
- You Ain’t That Fine
- When You Lose Your Money
- Al Basile – Vocals, Cornet
Mark Teixeira – drums - Brad Hallen – Electric Bass
- Bruce Bears – Keyboards
- Jeff “Doc” Chanonhouse – Trumpet
- Doug James – Tenor
- Kid Andersen – Guitar except for “Ain’t What You Say”
- Jhett Black – Guitar on “Ain’t What You Say”
- Jack Gauthier – Recording Engineer
- Glenn Halverson – Mixing and Mastering Engineer
- Recorded Jan/Feb 2025 at Lake West Recording Studio, West Greenwich, RI
- Additional recording at Greaseland, San Jose, CA
- Mixed and mastered July 2025 at Sonic Hill Studios, Ooltewah, TN
- All songs by Al Basile, Kenoza Music
- Design by Mary Ann Rossoni, Second Story Graphics, Providence, RI
- Photography by Meghan Sepe
About Al Basile:
Al Basile’s previous album releases have consistently made the top 20 on the Living Blues charts. He’s been nominated eight times for a Blues Music Award as “Best Horn Player,” and his 2016 release, Mid-Century Modern, was nominated as “Best Contemporary Blues Album.” His songs have been covered by Ruth Brown, Johnny Rawls, and the Knickerbocker All Stars. Guests on his own releases have included the Blind Boys of Alabama, Sista Monica Parker, Sugar Ray Norcia, Jerry Portnoy, and jazz great Scott Hamilton.
Celebrated for his mastery of lyric writing as well as music, Al's skill with words extends to his other career as a poet: he is published regularly in leading journals, has won prizes, and has four books in print collecting his work from the Seventies until the present day. For the last six years he has taught lyric writing, led panels, and performed at poetry conferences. In recent years Al has begun writing and producing audio plays in verse; two recent plays have won Gold Awards at the HEARnow national audio theater festival.
Born in Haverhill, Mass., on the north shore of Boston, Al was the first to receive a Master's degree from Brown University's writing program. He was the first trumpet player for Roomful of Blues in the mid-Seventies, and he's enjoyed a long relationship as a co-writer and sideman during Duke Robillard's solo career since the Eighties, garnering credits as songwriter and trumpet player on a dozen of Duke's CDs and DVDs. He also taught English, music, and physics in a private Rhode Island high school for 25 years before devoting himself to music and poetry full time in 2005.
Website: www.albasile.com
More information: Mark Pucci Mark Pucci Media | www.markpuccimedia.com
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